Mac Gems: Pixa is an image organizer made for creative work

At a Glance

Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2013. Every day (except Sunday) from mid-July until late September, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a standout free or low-cost program. Learn more about GemFest in this Macworld podcast. You can view a list of this year’s apps, updated daily, on our handy GemFest page, and you can visit the Mac Gems homepage for past Mac Gems reviews.

Pixa (Mac App Store link) is iPhoto for designers and writers. It’s an image and inspiration organizer with a slick interface and some smart tools for collecting all the other kinds of images you care about.

Pixa’s interface is immediately familiar, with your list of projects and folders in the left sidebar and all your stuff front and center. Pixa also supports and automatically updates Live Folders, folders of images that you want to work with in Pixa, but that are located on disk elsewhere on your Mac outside of Pixa’s library.

Pixa’s real magic comes from its excellent collection, organization, and export tools. You can easily take screenshots of just about anything, and Pixa can automatically tag images based on criteria like type (icons or vector), size, and even predominant color. Then you can create one-click export templates to fit the exact dimensions and file types that you workflow needs.

In short, Pixa fills that space between iPhoto and Photoshop with tools that let you get work done with images.

At a Glance

David Chartier Contributor

David has been covering Apple and how to get the most out of its products since 2005. Now a freelance tech writer, he runs Finer Things in Tech, jots down thoughts at DavidChartier.com, occasionally starts outlining the great American tech novel, and might still get to snowboard Breckenridge one more time.More by David Chartier